The Internet has made it possible for people to connect and share information in ways previously undreamt of. Social media platforms, for example, enable people to collaborate on ideas, discuss current events, or just share what they had for lunch. In fact, social networking has become one of the dominant ways people gather information and communicate.
As the popularity of social networking has grown, social networking sites have attracted billions of users across the world. These users spend an immense amount of time interacting with content on social media websites. On one popular social media website, for example, active users spend a total of over 120 million hours each year interacting with the website. These users can often produce hundreds of millions of posts, likes, mentions, and other content each day.
Providing the content that users are likely to find helpful or relevant increases the chances that users will interact with that content and that they will return to the website in the future. One way some social networking sites have done this is through notifications of available content or of other user actions. For example, a user can receive notifications when another “friend” user posts content, sends the user a message, has a birthday, or other events that the user may find of interest. However, providing too many notifications or providing notifications in a format that is not easily digestible for users can make users feel overwhelmed or make it difficult for them to identify notifications that they want to investigate. Any such barrier to reaching relevant content prevents users from being fully engaged, which may cause them to navigate to a different site. Therefore, determining which notifications to select and providing them in format that users will find useful is desirable to increase user engagement and web traffic.
The techniques introduced here may be better understood by referring to the following Detailed Description in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which like reference numerals indicate identical or functionally similar elements.